Ray of Sunshine Travel

It’s been one week since we arrived in Dunedin! What a week it’s been. My goal from here on out is to post here once a week, probably on Sundays. (I’m off to a bit of a late start this week.)

Dunedin (pronounced doo-NEE-din) is beautiful. Slightly more chilly than I expected, but still beautiful!

My flat is on Castle Street, which I quickly found out is THE party street. Lovely. They apparently were trying to put some quieter students on the street this year in an attempt to quiet things down. I don’t think it’s working that well.

My flat, however, is truly lovely! I get a room all to myself, and a big one at that!

My flatmates also seem to be really nice; there are four of us, all American, plus our Kiwi/Aussie host. We went and got fish and chips one night and ate them on the beach. Kind of chilly, but a great night!

A lot of last week was spent with ISA people doing orientation, or as they call it here, “O-week”, activities. We took care of some administrative stuff, like getting our student IDs, but also spent a lot of time just exploring Dunedin and the university.

Dee, our program mum, took us on a city tour on Wednesday and organized a scavenger hunt, Amazing Race style, on Thursday, so we covered a lot of ground.

One of the highlights of the hunt was climbing Baldwin Street, the steepest residential street in the world! This picture doesn’t do it justice…

Even though my team didn’t place, we were still treated to ice cream at the locally famous Rob Roy dairy. They have a bunch of unique flavors here, which is pretty cool. I got orange chocolate chip this time around, which was pretty tasty.

Another big part of O-Week is the Club Day. I really tried not to sign up for everything… I did make contact with a church there, and they invited me to a rooftop party downtown that evening! That was pretty cool.

ISA had an awesome, adventure-packed weekend also. Friday we went to the Catlins, which is on the southern tip of the South Island.

We started off with a very short hike through some Jurassic-like woods to get to a waterfall, which was beautiful!

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The highlight for me, however, was Nugget Point. I am seriously having such a hard time deciding which pictures to post here.

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SO pretty!! I definitely want to make it back there if I can – a sunset/sunrise there would be amazing!!

Afterwards, we went to the beach a little ways down the coast from Nugget Point. Also beautiful, though the water was pretty cold.

I could have stayed there a lot longer, but we had to make it back in time for rugby. Which was also a cool experience! Though I had no idea what was happening half the time…

I did learn a couple of things: 1) It’s a pretty acrobatic sport! For example, sometimes when the ball is thrown up high, teams will lift a player up in the air to try to catch it. 2) Players can’t throw the ball forwards, only to another player who is even with them. That means refs have to have super keen eyes at all times. 3) Fans go all out for this! We saw tons of students wearing onesies that were half blue, half yellow. Apparently KFC here makes a special bucket for fans that they can wear upside down on their heads… Also, there were people wearing giant chicken heads down on the field. Still haven’t figured that one out, considering the Highlanders’ mascot is definitely not a chicken.

Saturday was the Farmer’s Market, which was a neat experience. It seems like a lot of the produce there was actually cheaper than the supermarket, so I’ll probably be making a couple more trips back there. Got to try a homemade donut!

After the Farmer’s Market, we hiked the Pineapple Track. It ended up being about a 5-hour hike with some pretty steep trails. It was a great experience, although next time I would probably drive up most of the way and hike the last few minutes to the top. (I know, cheating…)

We got a great view of Dunedin! And of course, we had to bring along pineapple to keep the track’s tradition going.

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Sunday a small group of us from ISA tried out some churches. It seems like a lot of churches in Dunedin have morning and evening services, which is kinda cool. It’s pretty cool to worship with people from other countries! Praying God will lead us to a home church here.

Okay, I think that’s about it for this week! With classes starting and weekend plans up in the air, I know there’ll be plenty to report next week.

Until then, cheers!